Newt is forgiven

Writing about Newt Gingrich and Iowa last week, I was moved to open the Bible — to 2 Samuel, in fact, and the immortal tale of David and Bathsheba. Having grown up a good Church of Christ boy, I knew the story — King David is wandering around the palace when he happens to spy the lovely Bathsheba taking a bath on the roof of her house; the king, instantly smitten, summons her to the palace, gets her pregnant and then dispatches her husband Uriah to the battlefield and gets him killed. (I had forgotten that David first calls Uriah back to Jerusalem, urges him to go home, wash his feet and lie with his wife; the loyal Uriah, though, stays on duty, so the desperate David feels he has no choice but to have him dispatched.)

Here’s where Newt, the admitted adulterer, comes in: As Christian conservatives know, David not only commmitted adultery (and not just adultery but murder), but he confessed his sin to the prophet Nathan and God forgave him.

Thus, if you’re inclined to believe that the man best equipped to drive Barack Obama from the White House happens to be a man well acquainted with infidelity, then in all good conscience you can cast your vote for him in the Iowa caucus next month.

I ran that idea by Steve Deace, the Des Moines talk-radio host who’s a favorite of Iowa’s Christian conservatives. Deace said he saw certain similarities.

“They’re two extraordinarily God-gifted men,” he said, “who share a template — one with very high highs and very low lows. David was at his best when he was leading his army into battle, he said, not when he was back in the palace. Gingrich is the same, he said; he’s at his best when he’s embattled — as he’s about to be in Iowa. In fact, the battle has been joined.

Deace said he’s more inclined to support either Michele Bachmann or Rick Santorum but that he understood why Christian conservatives find Gingrich appealing. Newt is bold, he said, while the other two have been timid. “They (the Christian conservatives) want more bravado and less platitudes,” he said.

Deace said he had a question for fellow believers who have misgivings about voting for a divorced man: “Did you vote for Ronald Reagan?”

And what about Rick Perry, who hasn’t been shy about broadcasting his own conservative Christian bona fides?

“I have nothing but contempt for the people running that campaign,” Deace said. “All anyone knows about Rick Perry is his awful debate performances, the Gardasil issue and college tuition for illegal immigrants. It’s like he didn’t do anything else at all for 11 years.”

Deace also blames the candidate himself. “If he had run on what he wrote in ‘Fed Up,'” he said, “he’d be leading far and away, but he started backing away from the book within a week of getting into the race. The governor of Texas doesn’t tiptoe into the shallow end of the pool; you don’t start backpedaling.”

Mitt Romney won’t be getting the Christian conservative vote, Deace said, not because he’s a Mormon but because they don’t agree with him on the issues. “I think Romney’s Mormonism might cost him 10 percent of the evangelical vote,” he said. “Most Iowa evangelicals know more about Brigham Young football and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir than they do Mitt Romney’s Mormonism.”

Update: Gingrich may be forgiven, but that wasn’t enough for him to earn the endorsement of Bob Vander Plaats, the conservative Christian activist who engineered Mike Huckabee’s victory in the Iowa caucuses four years ago. Vander Plaats, who has a lot of sway in Iowa and elsewhere, went with Rick Santorum.

In Mississippi, meanwhile, the longtime activist who heads the American Family Association, Donald R. Wildmon, spurned his friend Perry and went with Gingrich. Wildmon and his group, you may remember, helped Perry put on The Response, the Reliant Stadium prayer fest in August that served as a prelude to the presidential campaign.